Out of Crisis

Did you lose a key Customer? A Key Employee? Are you Running your business? Or is it running you? Are you improving faster than your competitors? Are you making less than 10% Net Income?

Out of Crisis

Did you lose a key Customer? A Key Employee?Are you Running your business? Or is it running you?Are you improving faster than your competitors?Are you making less than 10% Net Income?

In October of 2015, Acadian Construction’s top sales person, who represented 70% of the total sales at the company, told President & CEO David Savoie, that he was going to retire in May 2016. David had recently bought the majority interest in his 60-year-old family business from his sister and a few others. David decided he did not want to confront another single point of failure as he looked to grow Acadian Construction.

The sales project began in February 2016. Losing the primary business development contributor galvanized Acadian’s project managers and site supervisors to bring in leads. Symplicity helped Acadian formalize the sales funnel. Formalizing Acadian’s sales process allowed Acadian to track its lead generation by job size, understand its conversation rates and prioritize the actions of the sales effort and estimators on size of jobs required for the available project managers. They now rank prospective clients based on their capacity to deliver, the contribution margin of the job, and the likelihood they will land the work. Most important, no one person makes up more than 40% of the sales at Acadian today and they are working to reduce that number.

Since that project, Acadian has improved the financial process, the project management process, the estimating process, and the site super process. They have trained one employee in NOVO Execution and their new strategic process allows them to identify and complete improvements on their own.

The results are impressive. Acadian construction has more than doubled Gross revenue and their bottom line results have more than quadrupled. They are delivering on their vision of building the community, their management team has clarity on the daily/weekly sequence of work, and their organization as a whole is more aligned on where they are headed.

As David Savoie notes, “Trust the journey – the process works. It was a critical transition that reshaped the culture and moved us from a reliance on people to focus on outcomes the process.”